I share Robert Frost’s birthday. Since I was a child, I’ve been fascinated by his poems. My Lenten reflection on Luke 15:11-32 finds me challenging (hopefully honoring his rhythms) perhaps his most familiar.

“Two roads diverged,” he said, and a person’s choice, makes for a golden autumn or merely a broken branch.

“Way leads on to way,” he said, and coming back to try another road is not how the travelers of life’s lonely woods are made.

But the parable says, if I read it right (and I’m reading it rather more than not, this Lent of pausing at the fork of things) …

Two roads diverge, and then goes on to claim that the journey back – repenting a twisted path of hurt and waste – is usually the one less traveled,

Thanks for this and for the implicit and explicit questions for pondering. I find myself asking another – what if the two roads are the two brothers and their lives? Is there a way back there? Not an idle question, given the deep division in this country now –